Books: The Mill on the Floss

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Thus Maggie was introduced for the first time to the young lady's
life, and knew what it was to get up in the morning without any
imperative reason for doing one thing more than another. This new
sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment amidst the soft-breathing
airs and garden-scents of advancing spring--amidst the new abundance
of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine, and the delicious
dreaminess of gliding on the river--could hardly be without some
intoxicating effect on her, after her years of privation; and even in
the first week Maggie began to be less haunted by her sad memories and
anticipations. Life was certainly very pleasant just now; it was
becoming very pleasant to dress in the evening, and to feel that she
was one of the beautiful things of this spring-time. And there were
admiring eyes always awaiting her now; she was no longer an unheeded
person, liable to be chid, from whom attention was continually
claimed, and on whom no one felt bound to confer any. It was pleasant,
too, when Stephen and Lucy were gone out riding, to sit down at the
piano alone, and find that the old fitness between her fingers and the
keys remained, and revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn
out by separation; to get the tunes she had heard the evening before,
and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of
producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language
to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she
would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she
might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of
intervals. Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that
indicates a great specific talent; it was rather that her sensibility
to the supreme excitement of music was only one form of that
passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made
her faults and virtues all merge in each other; made her affections
sometimes an impatient demand, but also prevented her vanity from
taking the form of mere feminine coquetry and device, and gave it the
poetry of ambition. But you have known Maggie a long while, and need
to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing
hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of
characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely
from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable
aphorisms,--"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have
a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good
old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive
Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a
reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody
sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the
frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Maggie's destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it
to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know
that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the
same final home. Under the charm of her new pleasures, Maggie herself
was ceasing to think, with her eager prefiguring imagination, of her
future lot; and her anxiety about her first interview with Philip was
losing its predominance; perhaps, unconsciously to herself, she was
not sorry that the interview had been deferred.

For Philip had not come the evening he was expected, and Mr. Stephen
Guest brought word that he was gone to the coast,--probably, he
thought, on a sketching expedition; but it was not certain when he
would return. It was just like Philip, to go off in that way without
telling any one. It was not until the twelfth day that he returned, to
find both Lucy's notes awaiting him; he had left before he knew of
Maggie's arrival.

Perhaps one had need be nineteen again to be quite convinced of the
feelings that were crowded for Maggie into those twelve days; of the
length to which they were stretched for her by the novelty of her
experience in them, and the varying attitudes of her mind. The early
days of an acquaintance almost always have this importance for us, and
fill up a larger space in our memory than longer subsequent periods,
which have been less filled with discovery and new impressions. There
were not many hours in those ten days in which Mr. Stephen Guest was
not seated by Lucy's side, or standing near her at the piano, or
accompanying her on some outdoor excursion; his attentions were
clearly becoming more assiduous, and that was what every one had
expected. Lucy was very happy, all the happier because Stephen's
society seemed to have become much more interesting and amusing since
Maggie had been there. Playful discussions--sometimes serious
ones--were going forward, in which both Stephen and Maggie revealed
themselves, to the admiration of the gentle, unobtrusive Lucy; and it
more than once crossed her mind what a charming quartet they should
have through life when Maggie married Philip. Is it an inexplicable
thing that a girl should enjoy her lover's society the more for the
presence of a third person, and be without the slightest spasm of
jealousy that the third person had the conversation habitually
directed to her? Not when that girl is as tranquil-hearted as Lucy,
thoroughly possessed with a belief that she knows the state of her
companions' affections, and not prone to the feelings which shake such
a belief in the absence of positive evidence against it. Besides, it
was Lucy by whom Stephen sat, to whom he gave his arm, to whom he
appealed as the person sure to agree with him; and every day there was
the same tender politeness toward her, the same consciousness of her
wants and care to supply them. Was there really the same? It seemed to
Lucy that there was more; and it was no wonder that the real
significance of the change escaped her. It was a subtle act of
conscience in Stephen that even he himself was not aware of. His
personal attentions to Maggie were comparatively slight, and there had
even sprung up an apparent distance between them, that prevented the
renewal of that faint resemblance to gallantry into which he had
fallen the first day in the boat. If Stephen came in when Lucy was out
of the room, if Lucy left them together, they never spoke to each
other; Stephen, perhaps, seemed to be examining books or music, and
Maggie bent her head assiduously over her work. Each was oppressively
conscious of the other's presence, even to the finger-ends. Yet each
looked and longed for the same thing to happen the next day. Neither
of them had begun to reflect on the matter, or silently to ask, "To
what does all this tend?" Maggie only felt that life was revealing
something quite new to her; and she was absorbed in the direct,
immediate experience, without any energy left for taking account of it
and reasoning about it. Stephen wilfully abstained from
self-questioning, and would not admit to himself that he felt an
influence which was to have any determining effect on his conduct. And
when Lucy came into the room again, they were once more unconstrained;
Maggie could contradict Stephen, and laugh at him, and he could
recommend to her consideration the example of that most charming
heroine, Miss Sophia Western, who had a great "respect for the
understandings of men." Maggie could look at Stephen, which, for some
reason or other she always avoided when they were alone; and he could
even ask her to play his accompaniment for him, since Lucy's fingers
were so busy with that bazaar-work, and lecture her on hurrying the
tempo, which was certainly Maggie's weak point.

One day--it was the day of Philip's return--Lucy had formed a sudden
engagement to spend the evening with Mrs. Kenn, whose delicate state
of health, threatening to become confirmed illness through an attack
of bronchitis, obliged her to resign her functions at the coming
bazaar into the hands of other ladies, of whom she wished Lucy to be
one. The engagement had been formed in Stephen's presence, and he had
heard Lucy promise to dine early and call at six o'clock for Miss
Torry, who brought Mrs. Kenn's request.

"Here is another of the moral results of this idiotic bazaar," Stephen
burst forth, as soon as Miss Torry had left the room,--"taking young
ladies from the duties of the domestic hearth into scenes of
dissipation among urn-rugs and embroidered reticules! I should like to
know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make
reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for
bachelors to go out. If this goes on much longer, the bonds of society
will be dissolved."

"Well, it will not go on much longer," said Lucy, laughing, "for the
bazaar is to take place on Monday week."

"Thank Heaven!" said Stephen. "Kenn himself said the other day that he
didn't like this plan of making vanity do the work of charity; but
just as the British public is not reasonable enough to bear direct
taxation, so St. Ogg's has not got force of motive enough to build and
endow schools without calling in the force of folly."

"Did he say so?" said little Lucy, her hazel eyes opening wide with
anxiety. "I never heard him say anything of that kind; I thought he
approved of what we were doing."

"I'm sure he approves _you_," said Stephen, smiling at her
affectionately; "your conduct in going out to-night looks vicious, I
own, but I know there is benevolence at the bottom of it."

"Oh, you think too well of me," said Lucy, shaking her head, with a
pretty blush, and there the subject ended. But it was tacitly
understood that Stephen would not come in the evening; and on the
strength of that tacit understanding he made his morning visit the
longer, not saying good-bye until after four.

Maggie was seated in the drawing-room, alone, shortly after dinner,
with Minny on her lap, having left her uncle to his wine and his nap,
and her mother to the compromise between knitting and nodding, which,
when there was no company, she always carried on in the dining-room
till tea-time. Maggie was stooping to caress the tiny silken pet, and
comforting him for his mistress's absence, when the sound of a
footstep on the gravel made her look up, and she saw Mr. Stephen Guest
walking up the garden, as if he had come straight from the river. It
was very unusual to see him so soon after dinner! He often complained
that their dinner-hour was late at Park House. Nevertheless, there he
was, in his black dress; he had evidently been home, and must have
come again by the river. Maggie felt her cheeks glowing and her heart
beating; it was natural she should be nervous, for she was not
accustomed to receive visitors alone. He had seen her look up through
the open window, and raised his hat as he walked toward it, to enter
that way instead of by the door. He blushed too, and certainly looked
as foolish as a young man of some wit and self-possession can be
expected to look, as he walked in with a roll of music in his hand,
and said, with an air of hesitating improvisation,--

"You are surprised to see me again, Miss Tulliver; I ought to
apologize for coming upon you by surprise, but I wanted to come into
the town, and I got our man to row me; so I thought I would bring
these things from the 'Maid of Artois' for your cousin; I forgot them
this morning. Will you give them to her?"

"Yes," said Maggie, who had risen confusedly with Minny in her arms,
and now, not quite knowing what else to do, sat down again.

Stephen laid down his hat, with the music, which rolled on the floor,
and sat down in the chair close by her. He had never done so before,
and both he and Maggie were quite aware that it was an entirely new
position.

"Well, you pampered minion!" said Stephen, leaning to pull the long
curly ears that drooped over Maggie's arm. It was not a suggestive
remark, and as the speaker did not follow it up by further
development, it naturally left the conversation at a standstill. It
seemed to Stephen like some action in a dream that he was obliged to
do, and wonder at himself all the while,--to go on stroking Minny's
head. Yet it was very pleasant; he only wished he dared look at
Maggie, and that she would look at him,--let him have one long look
into those deep, strange eyes of hers, and then he would be satisfied
and quite reasonable after that. He thought it was becoming a sort of
monomania with him, to want that long look from Maggie; and he was
racking his invention continually to find out some means by which he
could have it without its appearing singular and entailing subsequent
embarrassment. As for Maggie, she had no distinct thought, only the
sense of a presence like that of a closely hovering broad-winged bird
in the darkness, for she was unable to look up, and saw nothing but
Minny's black wavy coat.

But this must end some time, perhaps it ended very soon, and only
_seemed_ long, as a minute's dream does. Stephen at last sat upright
sideways in his chair, leaning one hand and arm over the back and
looking at Maggie. What should he say?

"We shall have a splendid sunset, I think; sha'n't you go out and see
it?"

"I don't know," said Maggie. Then courageously raising her eyes and
looking out of the window, "if I'm not playing cribbage with my
uncle."

A pause; during which Minny is stroked again, but has sufficient
insight not to be grateful for it, to growl rather.

"Do you like sitting alone?"

A rather arch look came over Maggie's face, and, just glancing at
Stephen, she said, "Would it be quite civil to say've s'?"

"It _was_ rather a dangerous question for an intruder to ask," said
Stephen, delighted with that glance, and getting determined to stay
for another. "But you will have more than half an hour to yourself
after I am gone," he added, taking out his watch. "I know Mr. Deane
never comes in till half-past seven."

Another pause, during which Maggie looked steadily out of the window,
till by a great effort she moved her head to look down at Minny's back
again, and said,--

"I wish Lucy had not been obliged to go out. We lose our music."

"We shall have a new voice to-morrow night," said Stephen. "Will you
tell your cousin that our friend Philip Wakem is come back? I saw him
as I went home."

Maggie gave a little start,--it seemed hardly more than a vibration
that passed from head to foot in an instant. But the new images
summoned by Philip's name dispersed half the oppressive spell she had
been under. She rose from her chair with a sudden resolution, and
laying Minny on his cushion, went to reach Lucy's large work-basket
from its corner. Stephen was vexed and disappointed; he thought
perhaps Maggie didn't like the name of Wakem to be mentioned to her in
that abrupt way, for he now recalled what Lucy had told him of the
family quarrel. It was of no use to stay any longer. Maggie was
seating herself at the table with her work, and looking chill and
proud; and he--he looked like a simpleton for having come. A
gratuitous, entirely superfluous visit of that sort was sure to make a
man disagreeable and ridiculous. Of course it was palpable to Maggie's
thinking that he had dined hastily in his own room for the sake of
setting off again and finding her alone.

A boyish state of mind for an accomplished young gentleman of
five-and-twenty, not without legal knowledge! But a reference to
history, perhaps, may make it not incredible.

At this moment Maggie's ball of knitting-wool rolled along the ground,
and she started up to reach it. Stephen rose too, and picking up the
ball, met her with a vexed, complaining look that gave his eyes quite
a new expression to Maggie, whose own eyes met them as he presented
the ball to her.

"Good-bye," said Stephen, in a tone that had the same beseeching
discontent as his eyes. He dared not put out his hand; he thrust both
hands into his tail-pockets as he spoke. Maggie thought she had
perhaps been rude.

"Won't you stay?" she said timidly, not looking away, for that would
have seemed rude again.

"No, thank you," said Stephen, looking still into the half-unwilling,
half-fascinated eyes, as a thirsty man looks toward the track of the
distant brook. "The boat is waiting for me. You'll tell your cousin?"

"Yes."

"That I brought the music, I mean?"

"Yes."

"And that Philip is come back?"

"Yes." (Maggie did not notice Philip's name this time.)

"Won't you come out a little way into the garden?" said Stephen, in a
still gentler tone; but the next moment he was vexed that she did not
say "No," for she moved away now toward the open window, and he was
obliged to take his hat and walk by her side. But he thought of
something to make him amends.

"Do take my arm," he said, in a low tone, as if it were a secret.

There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of
the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but
the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and
yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination. Either on that
ground or some other, Maggie took the arm. And they walked together
round the grassplot and under the drooping green of the laburnums, in
the same dim, dreamy state as they had been in a quarter of an hour
before; only that Stephen had had the look he longed for, without yet
perceiving in himself the symptoms of returning reasonableness, and
Maggie had darting thoughts across the dimness,--how came he to be
there? Why had she come out? Not a word was spoken. If it had been,
each would have been less intensely conscious of the other.

"Take care of this step," said Stephen at last.

"Oh, I will go in now," said Maggie, feeling that the step had come
like a rescue. "Good-evening."

In an instant she had withdrawn her arm, and was running back to the
house. She did not reflect that this sudden action would only add to
the embarrassing recollections of the last half-hour. She had no
thought left for that. She only threw herself into the low arm-chair,
and burst into tears.

"Oh, Philip, Philip, I wish we were together again--so quietly--in the
Red Deeps."

Stephen looked after her a moment, then went on to the boat, and was
soon landed at the wharf. He spent the evening in the billiard-room,
smoking one cigar after another, and losing "lives" at pool. But he
would not leave off. He was determined not to think,--not to admit any
more distinct remembrance than was urged upon him by the perpetual
presence of Maggie. He was looking at her, and she was on his arm.

But there came the necessity of walking home in the cool starlight,
and with it the necessity of cursing his own folly, and bitterly
determining that he would never trust himself alone with Maggie again.
It was all madness; he was in love, thoroughly attached to Lucy, and
engaged,--engaged as strongly as an honorable man need be. He wished
he had never seen this Maggie Tulliver, to be thrown into a fever by
her in this way; she would make a sweet, strange, troublesome,
adorable wife to some man or other, but he would never have chosen her
himself. Did she feel as he did? He hoped she did--not. He ought not
to have gone. He would master himself in future. He would make himself
disagreeable to her, quarrel with her perhaps. Quarrel with her? Was
it possible to quarrel with a creature who had such eyes,--defying and
deprecating, contradicting and clinging, imperious and beseeching,--
full of delicious opposites? To see such a creature subdued by love
for one would be a lot worth having--to another man.

There was a muttered exclamation which ended this inward soliloquy, as
Stephen threw away the end of his last cigar, and thrusting his hands
into his pockets, stalked along at a quieter pace through the
shrubbery. It was not of a benedictory kind.

Chapter VII

Philip Re-enters

The next morning was very wet,--the sort of morning on which male
neighbors who have no imperative occupation at home are likely to pay
their fair friends an illimitable visit. The rain, which has been
endurable enough for the walk or ride one way, is sure to become so
heavy, and at the same time so certain to clear up by and by, that
nothing but an open quarrel can abbreviate the visit; latent
detestation will not do at all. And if people happen to be lovers,
what can be so delightful, in England, as a rainy morning? English
sunshine is dubious; bonnets are never quite secure; and if you sit
down on the grass, it may lead to catarrhs. But the rain is to be
depended on. You gallop through it in a mackintosh, and presently find
yourself in the seat you like best,--a little above or a little below
the one on which your goddess sits (it is the same thing to the
metaphysical mind, and that is the reason why women are at once
worshipped and looked down upon), with a satisfactory confidence that
there will be no lady-callers.

"Stephen will come earlier this morning, I know," said Lucy; "he
always does when it's rainy."

Maggie made no answer. She was angry with Stephen; she began to think
she should dislike him; and if it had not been for the rain, she would
have gone to her aunt Glegg's this morning, and so have avoided him
altogether. As it was, she must find some reason for remaining out of
the room with her mother.

But Stephen did not come earlier, and there was another visitor--a
nearer neighbor--who preceded him. When Philip entered the room, he
was going merely to bow to Maggie, feeling that their acquaintance was
a secret which he was bound not to betray; but when she advanced
toward him and put out her hand, he guessed at once that Lucy had been
taken into her confidence. It was a moment of some agitation to both,
though Philip had spent many hours in preparing for it; but like all
persons who have passed through life with little expectation of
sympathy, he seldom lost his self-control, and shrank with the most
sensitive pride from any noticeable betrayal of emotion. A little
extra paleness, a little tension of the nostril when he spoke, and the
voice pitched in rather a higher key, that to strangers would seem
expressive of cold indifference, were all the signs Philip usually
gave of an inward drama that was not without its fierceness. But
Maggie, who had little more power of concealing the impressions made
upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings, felt her
eyes getting larger with tears as they took each other's hands in
silence. They were not painful tears; they had rather something of the
same origin as the tears women and children shed when they have found
some protection to cling to and look back on the threatened danger.
For Philip, who a little while ago was associated continually in
Maggie's mind with the sense that Tom might reproach her with some
justice, had now, in this short space, become a sort of outward
conscience to her, that she might fly to for rescue and strength. Her
tranquil, tender affection for Philip, with its root deep down in her
childhood, and its memories of long quiet talk confirming by distinct
successive impressions the first instinctive bias,--the fact that in
him the appeal was more strongly to her pity and womanly devotedness
than to her vanity or other egoistic excitability of her
nature,--seemed now to make a sort of sacred place, a sanctuary where
she could find refuge from an alluring influence which the best part
of herself must resist; which must bring horrible tumult within,
wretchedness without. This new sense of her relation to Philip
nullified the anxious scruples she would otherwise have felt, lest she
should overstep the limit of intercourse with him that Tom would
sanction; and she put out her hand to him, and felt the tears in her
eyes without any consciousness of an inward check. The scene was just
what Lucy expected, and her kind heart delighted in bringing Philip
and Maggie together again; though, even with all _her_ regard for
Philip, she could not resist the impression that her cousin Tom had
some excuse for feeling shocked at the physical incongruity between
the two,--a prosaic person like cousin Tom, who didn't like poetry and
fairy tales. But she began to speak as soon as possible, to set them
at ease.

"This was very good and virtuous of you," she said, in her pretty
treble, like the low conversational notes of little birds, "to come so
soon after your arrival. And as it is, I think I will pardon you for
running away in an inopportune manner, and giving your friends no
notice. Come and sit down here," she went on, placing the chair that
would suit him best, "and you shall find yourself treated mercifully."

"You will never govern well, Miss Deane," said Philip, as he seated
himself, "because no one will ever believe in your severity. People
will always encourage themselves in misdemeanors by the certainty that
you will be indulgent."

Lucy gave some playful contradiction, but Philip did not hear what it
was, for he had naturally turned toward Maggie, and she was looking at
him with that open, affectionate scrutiny which we give to a friend
from whom we have been long separated. What a moment their parting had
been! And Philip felt as if he were only in the morrow of it. He felt
this so keenly,--with such intense, detailed remembrance, with such
passionate revival of all that had been said and looked in their last
conversation,--that with that jealousy and distrust which in diffident
natures is almost inevitably linked with a strong feeling, he thought
he read in Maggie's glance and manner the evidence of a change. The
very fact that he feared and half expected it would be sure to make
this thought rush in, in the absence of positive proof to the
contrary.